HEATHER BENTON
Founding member
Heather Benton (co-founder & creative of *Necessary Digression, a performance collective: At Black Lake (Else) directed by Ashley Tata, Smoke-Song (original play in development) directed by Taylor Valentine. Heather identifies as a hybrid theatre maker/ performer/ educator whose artistic lens vacillates between acting, writing, directing/ devising.
Specializing in physical approaches to acting, she is a certified teacher in the Lucid Body acting technique and has been teaching & devising with Viewpoints for over 17 years. Heather is a company member of the physical theatre company, Blessed Unrest in NYC as an actor/ writer and training facilitator: La Musica Deuxieme (Anne-Marie), Chasing the Tides (an original solo show) and Battle of Angels (Myra)- all productions directed by Jessica Burr. She is a member of the acting ensemble in The Untitled Othello Project, dedicated to the ongoing interrogating and reclamation of Shakespeare's works: Othello (Emilia), Twelfth Night (Viola).
Heather has had a long career in regional and downtown theatre in New York (East River Commedia, Theatre Trouve) as an actor including several national tours (Montana Repertory Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, A Contemporary Theatre, Sierra Repertory Theatre, North Carolina Shakespeare Festival, Village Theatre, Luna Stage, Book It Repertory Theatre, Children's Theatre Company etc...). She is currently serving as the Head of Acting at Montclair State University where she teaches movement & acting and has directed/ devised 17 productions/ devised works in the department season and in collaboration with acting training institutions abroad in Santiago, Chile and Madrid, Spain. Prior to MSU, Heather served as the Head of Movement at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York where she taught acting & movement and directed/ devised over 7 productions/ devised works. MFA in Acting from the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at the American Repertory Theatre/ Moscow Art Theatre at Harvard.
APRIL SWEENEY
Founding member
April Sweeney is an actor, director, theater maker, and maker of other things. Her performance work has included collaborations with directors of distinct and diverse methods of performance making, moving between intimate immersive theater, (re)drawing and complicating “classical” heroines, plays in translation, hybrid performance works exploring the language of film and stage simultaneously, devised theater, and improvised film. She has performed in theaters and festivals in Argentina, Bolivia, Belgium, Colombia, Costa Rica, France, Hungary and in theaters across the U.S.
As a director she has created intimate chamber works in NYC, Buenos Aires, Germany, an immersive play in Maine, staged readings for regional theater, created theater with communities in Patagonia and the Bolivian selva, and curated theater engagement projects with Central New York audiences. At the center of her work, whether it be performing, directing, translating lies collaboration as a central tenant in the process of making. She creates circumstances and environments to bring collaborators of distinct disciplines together in order to mine our own experiences with authenticity and honesty. She endeavors to create work that maximizes spectator agency to ignite the exhilarating possibilities of storytelling.
Her work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Arts, National Endowment of the Humanities, New York State Council for the Arts, and the NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre award by the City of New York Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment in association with the New York Foundation of the Arts
SAUDA JACKSON
Sauda Aziza Jackson, a Chicago native, has performed in NYC for two decades. As a performer she has worked with Little Lord, Tanisha Christie, International Wow Co., Sponsored by Nobody; Lisa Clair, Target Margin, and Experiments in Opera. Her first foray in writing, I DIGRESS: The Intimate Insights of a Childhood Weirdo, a (4) four episode transmedia performance memoir was developed at Dixon Place’s Little Theater, SFX Festival (NYC), Wunderbar (SYRACUSE, NY). It premiered in 2023 with screenings at: Hi-ARTS Outdoor Film Festival, New York City Independent Theater and Film Festival, Theater Revolution’s Glass Ceiling Breakers Film Festival, Prelude 2023, Yonker’s LoFi Film Festival, and Black August Film Festival. The project was funded by NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theater and the NYSCA. Jackson’s new work, W.T.F, has had one developmental residency with Immediate Medium at the Hole (NYC, 2024). Jackson studied theater at Eastern Illinois University graduating with a B.A in Theater Arts and continued her studies in the MFA Acting program at Brooklyn College.
Taylor Valentine
Taylor Valentine..............
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